‘Entangled Agents’: Women, Espionage and Empire from 1920 to 1945

The outbreak of the Second World War saw a wider recruitment of women for various roles in intelligence, counter-intelligence and espionage. There had already been an active policy of their recruitment by spy agencies in Britain, continental Europe and the United States, not just for desk work and signals intelligence but for active field duty as well. Agencies and organisations inimical to Western interests, such as the Naródnyy komissariát vnútrennikh del or People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union, Comintern (the Communist International), its London-based proxy, the Anti-War Movement, and a range of socialist and left-oriented workers’ unions, were arguably a few steps ahead in recruiting women and deploying them in sensitive roles. Using contemporaneous declassified records, this article briefly looks at three entangled women agents across the colonial–imperial sphere of conflict during the Second World War and the decade leading up to it. Drawing from contemporary conceptions of transnationalism and entangled histories wherein actors, entities and ideas across temporal and topographical spaces find common conceptual ground, this article relies on secret intelligence documents to discuss hitherto unexplored narratives, ambiguities and affective details.